journey not recovery

I have been in a lot of treatment and met many people who got the help and attention, intervention, early on. I am not one of those people, though I needed that help desperately. My mother describes me as a very young child to be outgoing and bubbly, scaring away other children in the playground with my overwhelming friendliness. I was afraid of nothing. But by the age of 5 there was a split in who I was. That happy child morphed into a sad, depressed little girl. I shut down completely, lost my voice and rarely spoke. My kindergarten teacher commented to my mother that she was concerned I never smiled. My third grade teacher also expressed concern. My mother's response? "That's just how Caitlin is." I would cry at night and not have the words for what was wrong and she just would get frustrated. I was wordless. The Unsayable had me destroyed. But that's not who I was originally. My trauma changed who I was. It altered the person I was supposed to be, suicidal tho...

My cuts are open-mouthed sirens singing high-pitched help psalms. If you looked you would know. If you saw I wouldn't have to tell. My parents saw it as a suicide attempt that first trip for stitches. Then they never spoke of it again. The day after no one would speak to me at all as if I had sinned against them. Each wound is a different cry, a different voice. Each is as significant as the next one and the one before it. Each one is silenced and shrouded in gauze and bandages and often never spoken of to anyone. If I slice my skin in silence is my skin even really split? If no one sees it where is the proof it took place? Sometimes I want someone to take care of them but when I do I downplay it, I am calm and smiling "this is not the worst." 17 years and I started at 17. The damage has been done, the stitches aren't cosmetic. My case worker doesn't ask about my cutting anymore, it is as predictable as the seasons. But no one sees it happen for real on the bathro...

Birthdays have been hard won. Is "won" the right word when it has been a battle but not a victory? I didn't try for this.  Every year I'm here feels like a shameful failure, honestly. I value the love I receive and others' care but I would really rather not still be here. It's a reminder I have failed my suicide efforts, reminds of the crushing despair of coming to in another ICU bed, or the taste of charcoal in my throat, the tangle of wires and monitors, stitches and hospitalizations. Survival is a lie. It doesn't show the death I feel in my soul and it does not do justice to the pain and trauma I have endured. I was killed off early on, something essential stolen from me. Who I was supposed to be forever altered and destroyed. I am a ghost girl wandering hospital halls and emergency rooms. I am a scarred spector searching, self destructing to try to fill the sinking emptiness that consumes me, the longing that will never be filled. Black hole never whol...

Need is like a bottomless pit. Like hunger that is un-ending. I receive and feel something good for a moment, but then it highlights a lack of something essential. I start to feel starving. What I received doesn't feel like Enough. There is so much I didn't get and I can't catch up to it all. Then I am filled with fear and wanting. I need so much that no one could possibly give it without becoming drainers themselves because I need EVERYTHING. Going back to the beginning. I start to feel like it goes so deep that it's an emergency. I need something NOW to fill the void that opens up wider every time I am given something good. I can't get enough. No one can be near enough. There is a reaching and then fear. Fear of the hole in me and how it devours my core. It encompasses everything. Then I want to detach. Why eat at all if you're just going to become hungry again later? Override the hunger with starvation so that the hunger goes away. Live in the lack so that it...

All of my life I have struggled with something as basic as object permenance that toddlers learn; that people and things continue to exist when out of sight. When I was in long term care it was at the point where I would be in the same room with someone and have to ask, crying, if they were still there. If my doctor, when behind the desk and out of sight, still existed. My nurse would tuck me in at night and leave, returning the morning, and it was as if I would never see her again. And when I was alone it felt as though I had stopped existing because there was no one there to reflect me back. This was crippling to me. I never learned to internalize the presence of others. I lived in fear, I could not be alone without feeling as if I and everyone I loved stopped being when I couldn't see them. This is absolute agony. My first experience of being mirrored back happened with my therapist Jason. He would look at me and I could see myself in his eyes. It was terrifying at first, almost...

My therapist says I don't need to solve all my conflicts right now. I am divided in so many ways and show it by splitting my skin wide open. It remains as my strongest voice when words lack the weight. Hospital gowns and gauze, scissors and stitches and the burn of lidocaine needles. The explaining and the downplaying so as not to be hospitalized. It's all on autopilot at this point. I know the right things to say and play the game. I have been cutting for 17 years and started at age 17. I'm so scarred people often ask if I was in a fire. My therapist says thank God for it. It's why I have survived this long. I say its been too long.

It was a kind thought this nurse had for me: "You can't be the sick girl. That's not you identy. You are a strong kick-ass woman." I understand what she means and it made me feel good in some ways but she also missed something important:  I never been anything but the sick girl. Invisible existence because people couldn't ever understand. Sick girl was also at 18, in her first psych admit. In her 20s when sick girl found the trauma unit and it was where she lived, she never left, never out for more than a week before she would be brought back in pulsating red and blue comes back to stay months longer. Sick girl was quiet but she's spit out words at her intended targets which often ended up with them crying. Not sick girl  Sick girl was in her 20's and tucked into her bed at night by her favorite nurse, always assigned to her every shift she worked. Sick girl's nurse. Sick girl's doctor was a kind of God to her and Sick Girl's social worker was ...

I have been the loudest person on the psych unit, wailing my heart out at times of tremendous pain that had been so built up over my life; breaking shit and cutting in front of people so impulsively; getting restrained; and arguing with people, instigating and once pouring a bottle of Ensure over a girl's head . Basically taking up the most time and attention. Did I know I was doing that? Hell no. I had no awareness of what I was doing or thought at all of the existence of other patients. I was going through something major, life-altering that until then had never been talked about.  I was in a place in my life where I believed in the depths of my heart that I can't trust anyone because everybody leaves. In addition to that, I my Self was not a solid being. I existed only in the eyes and the physical being with another. This created a dilemma. Trusting people who can't be trusted in order for me to exist. I would spend every day making people promise they weren't leavin...

I worry I will wear people thin like paper dolls crumbling beneath the weight of me. I am an empty hole, always needing something, someone, anything. I try to fill it with people but they always disappoint me or end up abandoning me without explanation. So instead I fill it with slicing my skin, making a deep void I can physically see. Or fill the emptiness with literal emptiness, the lack of nutrition. I feel that I am a burden, a baby never fully developed. I rely on others for me to know that I exist to myself. I am revolving hospital doors constantly for the last 16 years. People see me over and over again, on repeat, the same story and wreck of a girl. Everyone gets sick of me being sick in the end. They invest energy, see no progress just worsening harm, and they become hurt and take it personally, walking away from me. This happens over and over  My psychiatrist Dr. V is a miracle. He lets me Be. He sits with my sadness silently so I'm not alone with it. Sometime...

I'm not afraid to die, but I am afraid to live. That is not what I planned on; in fact, I have already outlived myself, lived beyond what I had planned on growing up. I never saw much of a future for myself and I still do not. I was told early on that I would die or live out the rest of my life in a state hospital. I got out of the state hospital and though I've had close calls with death many times, I am still somewhat here. I say somewhat because I feel that I am existing and not living. My life is still a mess of hospitalizations and suicide attempts, frequent self-harm episodes and major food restriction. I am not convinced I want to be here. What would it mean to live? To me living is giving up. It's saying the trauma that happened to me can be healed when I don't believe I will ever recover from it. To get better from it seems to say it wasn't bad enough to kill me when it was. I do not forgive or forget. I do not wish to move on with my life as though it ...

There is a funeral for myself in my head. I'm not dead yet but they've brought wreathes and flowers and their prayers. It's too soon but also too late. My nightmares are my unconscious telling me over and over what I try to suppress, what I don't want to admit. They are clear as day and haunt me in my waking hours. Trauma is your body being taken over by someone else. They continue to live on there after it's over, making you feel culpable because your body unwillingly took part. I don't want to be my abuse, I don't want to live it every day. And I don't want to admit to myself what happened I won't say it aloud in therapy still. We talk around it. Body memories and flashbacks. I need a kind of exorcism of what took place, expell it from my physical self and my mind. Crosses and holy water, my body laid out, watch my head spin.

I've been hospitalized more times than years than I've been alive and many of those times were because I tried to die. Popped pills and frantic forearm artery spurts, and atrocities against myself I can't speak of in detail. But I have yet to have forgiven my survival, the sense of failure upon waking upnin Intensive care units, or the taste of choked- down charcoal on my cracked lips. The crushing disappointment of failing at the one thing I thought I was good at: dying. I am a suicide survivor in both my own attempt at taking my life and of my little sister's hanging in the basement. I understand the ramifications of suicide. But I also understand the desire. And I am not one of those who die to escape the pain while wishing they could love, not completely. I genuinely most of the time seek death itself. imagine getting high snorting suicide off the slit veins of your wrists. I keep running closer to the edge. Sometimes it feels as though I live for dying...

I believe forgiveness has its merits in healing for some, but I do not wish to forgive or forget. My body is a monument to hurt, to what was done to me, scarred and starved in revenge for His transgressions and Her not protecting me. The denial and hiding and making my truths sound like I am just a mental patient no one cared enough to ever visit. My skin weeps red, my bones hold the sorrow I want to be visible through my flesh. I want them to get on their knees and pray. I want them to ask for salvation from their sins, stigmata dripping from the palms of my hands in anguish. I will not forget. I will not allow it to ever be okay and I will not move on and let it go. What happened deserves justice for this continued suffering and loss of life. Let them choke on my ashes and fall upon my grave in devastation. But they won't. They breathe lies and denial. They swallowed me whole, my childhood emptied so early on. And I stumble on limping, I carry on not wanting to go on. My ...

The other day my case worker asked me what my goals with my therapist are. The truth is, we don't have goals that the larger system would like me to have, such as eat, restore weight, stop or reduce cutting, improve depression. Because we both know that is not how therapy works. It's about long term progress and growth; not instant or even visible change some of the time. A lot of it goes on inside, small shifts in thinking or for me, the new ability, after all the years in therapy, to be able to actually talk. My therapist believes that me having my garden is very important. He thinks that for me, who struggles with severe depression and PTSD, among other things, the small moments of joy and contentment and laughter are crucial. He knows that my ultimate goal is to die, in fact. But in my time left, he would like me to be able to have moments of peace, even if fleeting, in the little things: sunshine, a good cup of coffee, connection with others. A big part of our work...

Sometimes at heart I feel institutionalized, meant to live in institutions. That life is partially ingrained in me deep down. Whether the circumstances are good or bad, it is my comfort zone. The second I'm admitted anywhere have a flock of patient friends and there are staff who come in to chat and catch up. There are people who like me and seem to care. There are also adversaries and power issues that play out and I am constantly repeating and fighting. This cycle feels inescapable at times. It feels to be at my core. I feel like an emergency, a walking crisis stitched up strangling on my words. Strapped down screaming. I am always snatching failure from the jaws of victory, perpetual patient wandering the halls hidden in hospital clothes. I was told early on I would either die or live out my life in a state hospital. When I got to a state hospital it seemed fulfilled. It still seems wrong that I forced my way out of there, lying and battling and flying under the radar, ...

As a child i struggled with eating in school. Every day, starting in kindergarten, I would throw away my uneaten lunch in the cafeteria room trash. I would go the whole day without eating.I had this deep feeling that being seen eaten was shameful. I felt embarrassed at the meer fact of having a body. Early trauma left this deep sense of shame and worthlessness inside of me and I didn't have the words to explain to anyone. My Anorexia didn't begin with wanting to lose weight or with dieting. It started out as a voice whispering in my ear, "You don't deserve to eat." It seemed to appear just overnight one day, but I know now it had been building for a long time. I was silent in school as a child. My kindergarten teacher called my mother and was concerned that I never smiled. I hid my body in boys' clothes, and learned how to become invisible, a ghost girl, left alone. When I was first in treatment for my cutting I was left with the inability to being...

I used to not talk. I had the ability to speak but I lacked the words and the belief that nothing I had to say mattered or was worth being listened to. When I started therapy i sat mostly silent for whole sessions. When I was questioned about things I became so afraid of my reality, what I thought was real, being shattered in the light. I would skip sessions or else leave there feeling physically ill and going straight to bed in a darkened room, often missing classes. It's taken many therapists and a lot of years to learn to find words for things instead of acting them out. My therapist now tells me "Everything is important." I am learning that I have things worth saying that matter and deserve to be heard and listened to . However, I have yet to truly address my trauma. I was always an emergency, constantly, and not able to be safe, so talking about topics in depth was not really an option. Though I still react strongly to things and put myself in jeopardy, t...

Hospital roommates, unlikely pairs thrown together, laying across from one another. "I did not choose him/he did not choose me/we have no chance/of recovering/sharing hospital joy/and misery" (Hospital Beds- Cold War Kids).  I have had so many roommates throughout the years that I can deal with almost anything, including the day and night rumbling snorer, the late-night eater with crinkling chip bags, the girl who read my diary. There were women who struggled as much as I did, like when I woke up to my roommate choking out my name, a pillow case tied around her neck. The older woman I told stories to, read picture books, who wailed when staff talked to her. I have also found friends and saviors. Michele, sitting beneath the Christmas tree crying in the Eating Disorder unit group room, named me Punk. She was spunky, sneaking Splenda packs slipped into her sweatshirt for us. Flipping the nurses off behind their backs to make me laugh. Crocheting us scarves, Mother to ...

"How long do you think you'll be here?" The psych ward doctor asked me just the morning after I was discharged from a medical hospital because of a suicide attempt. I'd been coming to this hospital for many years, many times a year sometimes kept for months at a time, my symptoms were so severe. But I had never had this doctor on this particular unit. Clearly though he knew about me. " Hospitals aren't always helpful for people like you," he said. He went on to describe me as "chronic" and said, "There's nothing we can really do to help." How could he know these things right off the bat, before even meeting with me? That is the stigma of a borderline personality disorder diagnosis. My reputation preceded me. I had just almost lost my life at my own hands but every day this doctor would spend just a few minutes with me, not offering any options to help, just asking how long I thought I would be there. I had never ...

I read someone say once that rock bottom is when you stop digging. What does rock bottom mean to you? Over the years I've realized the rock bottom I keep seeking is truly bottomless. Wouldn't it have been bleeding out in my bathroom floor? Trips to the ICU? The sheer number of hospitalizations or being sent to a state hospital when everyone gave up on me? The loss of people who got tired of my illness? The loss of jobs and opportunities and purpose? So many things. I've always had a death wish, seeing how far I can go, to what extremes. I wanted something to feel like I had finally reached "Enough." Enough would mean feeling whole, complete, sick enough, close enough to death that I was scared. I have yet to get there, if it even exists. If rock bottom is actually when one stops digging than maybe that's why I haven't reached it. I have yet to stop digging completely. Always further to fall, skin to slice, bones to see rise to the surface ...

Three months out of a hospitalization, I walk through the liquor store doors and am hired rightwright awayeyes on my teased up bleached-out hair and piercings, arms with pink scar tissue crawling and zyprexa-puffed cheeks. The owners say to Paul, "Why can't you hire someone normal?" Customers call to complain about pain made visible on my skin. I am given a chance anyway. I find a home beneath the neon beer signs bagging cheap plastic vodka bottles and punching numbers, counting coins, hands flying on autopilot. I find a voice that snaps and sometimes shouts and hands that gesture to throw men out who leer and speak with broken teeth and booze breath. Even on the sidewalks I am Liquor Store Girl  I find somewhere to be. I find fathers, men who tease and scold, who stock coolers and count out drawers, give advice and rides at night. I listen to stories and go to antique car shows and ask about kids and grandkids and diabetes. I find a tall skinny boy who sk...

What does recovery mean for me? I am no longer living in the hospital but I'm sent there every few months. Enough that my life is constantly interrupted and it's hard to plan for anything. I'm not still 80 lbs but I am working to starve myself to death. My limbs are forever altered by disfiguring scars and I get comments and states wherever I go. I am working hard in therapy but I am tormented still by my trauma. I imagine recovery to be a kind of healing. A disinterest in dying and wanting to live. My favorite thing is self-destruction. How do I ever give that up when it is such a huge part of me and how I have been able to survive this long? Who am I without it? I am not happy where I am but why do I not wish for better? I guess I don't think I deserve it. I have a loyalty to suffering. It seems noble to me, it seems justified, it keeps things under control. I think to recover you have to be more sick and tired of being sick and tired than ...

I am a crime scene body, the chalk outline of a girl lost. Im a corpse that I drag around. If I were dusted for fingerprints I would be littered with them. But I'm not in any milk carton photos. I went missing before my mother's eyes; Maybe she wasn't even looking. Left in someone else's hands On me, Trapping me, Taking me over. I am willing to burn this body down for something better Something not already stolen Something innocent. I am a marrionette puppet, strings hanging from my limbs. I am abandoned house My bones turn to ash.

One thing you won't see on my blog, as you may have noticed, is a trigger warning when I talk about difficult things. I don't mind if people put a trigger warning when they share a link to my blog or a post....that's their choice. For me to put a trigger warning on stories from my life feels like a way of apologizing for what I'm about to say: I'm sorry this is hard, or ugly, or messy, that you have to look or listen. I had no trigger warning for my life experiences, and have been called a trigger to others. As though I have to walk around apologizing for the ways I have had to cope to survive. Yes I have scars and yes they are permanent damage. They are the result of other damages I have lived through. I once got kicked out of a treatment program for just bringing up the subject that I wanted to be able to wear t-shirts when I'm hot and uncomfortable. I was told this was bothersome to the sensabilities of others. Instead of having a conversation abo...

What if a hospital is the closest thing you've ever had to a home? Where do you end up? When I started getting admitted to McLean Hospital's PTSD and Dissociative Disorders Unit on a regular basis, it became this place I finally felt safe and loved for the first time in my life.  Why there ? You may ask. Seems like an odd place to find yourself to be at home, especially when hospitals have historically been a damaging experience for myself, stripped of rights, power, and sense of personhood. Proctor 2, however, was something special. Staff were kind, gentle, and uniquely trained to deal with individuals who had experienced major trauma, both men and women, though usually there were mostly women. When I was walked up to the unit for the first time, the first thing I noticed was the silence. Unusual for a psych ward at night. What is a home? A place one feels safe, like their physical and emotional needs are met. Family. Silent girls stalking hallways, whispers. a...

I haven't yet survived my life. What is survival if it hasn't been exactly voluntary? In mental health we speak sometimes about "resiliency." To me, that word means getting through something difficult and coming out on the other side. To me, it's not the same as strength. Instead, for me resiliency has not been a choice. I haven't made it this far because I have wanted to necessarily. I have endured pain, trauma, life-altering grief while being forced into hospitals against my will, hooked up to feeding tubes involuntarily when I wanted to starve myself to death, stitched back together when I cut an artery open, and had 911 called on me other times I've tried to end my life. Good luck? Rotten luck? Sometimes I can't be sure. But what I do know is that after all these years I don't feel like what people call a Survivor. I don't feel strong or really yet that I have chosen life. I feel I am living halfway, in a kind of Limbo. Alive but not ...

I remember all the times at Proctor 2 my nurses used to spend with me, trying to get me to eat something instead of waiting til my blood glucose dropped to coma levels and they had to administer glycogen. I didn't think that unless my body was blatantly in crisis that eating was even necessary. Alex would tell me the dangers; that if they ever needed to revive me they would end up crushing my body. He would urge me on with bites of an apple, with juice. Christina would make me hopeful English muffins with cereal pieces glued into a smiling face on top. Mini Gatorade bottles with "Drink Me" signs taped to it like I was Alice, forever trying to grow smaller when they wanted me taking up more space. The days my vitals would drop too low to be allowed off the hall I would gaze through the heavy locked screens, my face squashed against them. I knew I was missing out on friends and the world and whatever it was my life was supposed to be. Swallowed tubes slid down my throat, ...

In my disappearance I am more visible. Self-enclosed, not needing, I stare unblinking at my reflection as it fades and becomes more unrecognizable. I revisit traumas and wonder if they really existed at all. I bring myself back to the same scene over and over again. Overturned, struggling. Intrusive. Bleeding, I make pain visible in order that I may see a truth. My body translates for me where words lack. I watch my limbs shrink in, find myself in the spaces around them, become negative space. I know I am badly failing at survival but it feels like the only way to live. I wait to fall farther. All I'm left with is an emptiness, a powerful sense of loss.  I tear apart my life looking to find it and now my time seems almost up. I am still a five year-old child, just knowing she has to get away from the body, the scene of the crime. Hospital girl, in files and hallways, waiting always. Waiting for doctors, waiting to get out, my life is a series of waiting rooms. There is no end t...

My body gripped with fear, frozen, flashbacks smacking me in the head hard. My breath caught like butterflies in my throat, rabbit heart racing, my body the echoes of an Aftershock. The tragedy took place here and so I have never had a home. Too young to remember any different, who I was to become erased outright, over in seconds. They say the body holds on to the unsayable, buried in bones and blood I am an unspoken text readable in the braille bumps self-inflicted in my skin. I am a testament to what destroyed me. I am a white flag raised in battles lost.

One of the many challenges of having both a severe eating disorder and mental illness is that nowhere seems equipped to deal with all of me. When I'm in treatment at an eating disorder unit there is little to no support for my PTSD, depresssion, or BPD issues. I often get placed in strictly psychiatric wards to deal with my dangerous levels of self-harm and suicidalityehile my lakv of eating goes barely dealt with. When I was put in Tewksbury State Hospital it was for the above SI reasons but I was also dealing with the constant starvation and weight loss that comes from having anorexia. It was easy for me to keep it quiet and let my cutting and scars overshadow everything else. That's what using gets the most attention for imminent risk and it can be frustrating. My disorder is often complicit in allowing this to happen in order to avoid the refeeding and weight gain process that comes from eating disorder treatment. I have never received complete treatment that encomp...

Sometimes I wonder what progress I have made from the girl smashing soap dispensers and openly cutting on the unit, to the girl cutting quietly with glass mirror shards when left alone. 4 days a week of therapy and still I'm a crime scene body with screams that are silent. When will I not need to do this? How many people will have to listen to me before it's close to my parents hearing me and when will that just be enough? Because it never is. And I'm curious, when does the pain get to be enough? When does the suffering add up to something succinctly expressed?

I'm 34 years old and I've been struggling with what people call "mental illness" my whole life. PTSD, MDD, BPD, and anorexia are the labels they've settled on over the years. They, borderline personality disorder in particular, have been used to control me throughout my life, but labels don't define me anymore. As I've gotten to know myself, labels stopped being part of me, though I'd be lying if I said they don't still haunt me...damage has been done. the mental health system has hurt me as well as helped me. I'll continue getting into that in later posts. Mostly, this blog is to share my journey. I don't label myself as "in recovery" because to me that means something other than where I am now in my life as an adult. I still starve myself. I cut myself badly and frequently, struggle to get through the days. I just got out from another hospital stay just days ago. But I am working towards something like healing, if that exists. N...